Topics in Film
The Moving Image: Film and Visual Representation

Voyage in Italy (Viaggio in Italia)

Tensions pile up in Rossellini’s deeply moving and beautifully nuanced story of a frustrated and bored British couple (Bergman and Sanders) who struggle to keep their marriage alive. The film resembles a diary as it meditates on the problems of the jaded communication between the spouses on their visit to Naples. As Rossellini has stated, “It was very important for me to show Italy, Naples, and that strange atmosphere in which is found a very real, very immediate feeling: the feeling of eternal life, something that has entirely disappeared from the world.”

November 28 (Wednesday) 7 pm

Contempt (Le Mépris)

Based on Alberto Moravia’s novel Il Disprezzo (A Ghost at Noon), Godard’s early masterpiece focuses on the breakup of a marriage as it delivers sharp commentary on the state of international filmmaking. A scriptwriter (Piccoli), conscripted to craft an adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey, is caught between the film’s earnest director (Fritz Lang) and its crass producer (Palance), who imagines a vulgarization of the story. Marital and professional contempt reach a crescendo as the locale shifts from Rome to a modernist villa in Capri, where Godard places the moral choices into stark relief.